Infrared and Harsh Light Visible Image Fusion Using an Environmental Light Perception Network

Abstract

The complementary combination of emphasizing target objects in infrared images and rich texture details in visible images can effectively enhance the information entropy of fused images, thereby providing substantial assistance for downstream composite high-level vision tasks, such as nighttime vehicle intelligent driving. However, mainstream fusion algorithms lack specific research on the contradiction between the low information entropy and high pixel intensity of visible images under harsh light nighttime road environments. As a result, fusion algorithms that perform well in normal conditions can only produce low information entropy fusion images similar to the information distribution of visible images under harsh light interference. In response to these problems, we designed an image fusion network resilient to harsh light environment interference, incorporating entropy and information theory principles to enhance robustness and information retention. Specifically, an edge feature extraction module was designed to extract key edge features of salient targets to optimize fusion information entropy. Additionally, a harsh light environment aware (HLEA) module was proposed to avoid the decrease in fusion image quality caused by the contradiction between low information entropy and high pixel intensity based on the information distribution characteristics of harsh light visible images. Finally, an edge-guided hierarchical fusion (EGHF) module was designed to achieve robust feature fusion, minimizing irrelevant noise entropy and maximizing useful information entropy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared to other advanced algorithms, the method proposed fusion results contain more useful information and have significant advantages in high-level vision tasks under harsh nighttime lighting conditions.